NASA is ready to perform a workaround to get the recently crippled Hubble Space Telescope back in working order.
As we wrote a few weeks ago (see Hubble Telescope Failure Causes NASA to Scramble), the Hubble is dark due to a failure in its Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SIC&DH) unit. The malfunction took out the data communications system's Side A circuit, for reasons unknown (other than old age). So the U.S. space agency has compiled a procedure to activate its Side B circuit by remote control from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., later today.
According to a NASA press release today, aeronautics engineers are in the process of booting up Side B and readying it to work with the orbiting telescope's instruments. The Hubble team has put the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer back into safe mode after waking them temporarily to test them with the Side B instrument controls.
The space agency said engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore should complete their review of these "internal exposures" by noon (EDST) on Friday.
"This procedure involves collecting and comparing baseline exposures previously supported by Side A of the SIC&DH to new exposures supported by Side B," wrote NASA today. "This review will be one last check of the 'transparency' (non-impact) of switching to the redundant spacecraft electronics the Hubble team activated on Wednesday."
The head of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management Office, Art Whipple, simplified the complicated process: "This is something that is a little out of the norm of what you would do around the house, but it's probably not unlike what an IT professional might do with an office network."
Keep your fingers crossed, space enthusiasts.
